FYP Title: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted GSM Base Station for Emergency Coverage
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Leow Chee Yen
When Natural Disaster occurs most of the Base Station would be down or destroyed creating a limitation of the spectrum and cellular coverage. Because of this, victims usually are unable to call for help making their rescue to be delayed as the rescuers have a problem in locating them. Aside from this, in a crowded area, the number of users trying to connect to the same base station would be overwhelming for the spectrum. Because of this, some users would not be able to access the network at all. To solve this issue, researchers are looking into possibilities in implementing a UAV aerial base station. However, some researchers are implementing LTE femtocell and picocell which requires a much more big and powerful drone to improve its performance. Aside from that, there is also not a lot of studies being conducted on the air-to-ground measurement for UAV aerial base station. Because of this, for this FYP project, a UAV GSM aerial base station is proposed. The GSM Base Station proposed would be made using a Raspberry Pi B, USRP B200mini and OpenBTS and later integrated into a Quadcopter. Aside from this, the air-to-ground measurement between the UAV GSM aerial base station and the user device would also be investigated using RSSI measurement. The RSSI measurement would be recorded using a Net Monitoring Lite app. The project would start by installing the UHD driver and OpenBTS into the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi would then be used to control the USRP to create a working GSM base station that would be integrated into a drone. Then to determine the best coverage area the air-to-ground measurement of the UAV aerial base station would be investigated. From this project, the expected outcome would be to be able to make a working GSM base station that would enable users to make voice calls and SMS. Other than that, is to be able to study and investigate the Air to Ground channel propagation between the user and the GSM UAV Base station to determine the best maximum coverage.